Savage (10 page)

"That's Linda's big line," I said.

Jeremy looked at Stephen. "You were great as my wife."

"OK, so let's do that line, the one about, you know, the one where he says, ‘I realized what a ridiculous lie my whole life has been,' OK?"

Soon it was time for the abject hose scene. I intentionally overacted the scene, struggling with the vacuum hose as if it were a live snake. Everyone cracked up.

"You guys OK in here?" Mom asked, poking her head through the door frame.

"Cut," I yelled. "Let's do that again, and Jeremy will try to hide the hose and Stephen you come in and ask what he's doing."

Mom shut her mouth slowly into a flat line. She saw me holding the vacuum hose extension and shook her head. "Just be careful, Nate," she said, disappearing again.

"We're almost done: just the car-washing scene. We can do that with Lego."

"You have Lego?" Stephen asked, his face trussed in judgment.

"Sure." I said. "Why wouldn't I have Lego? Everyone has Lego."

"Oh, Nate, I'm picking up Holly from the subway. I'll be back in half an hour or so."

"OK, thanks for the newsflash."

Setting up three Lego men beside a toy car, Stephen did the final commentary, his sloppy pronouncements the results of egg salad, his severe dental work and forced British accent: "Willy becomes immersed in a daydream. He praises his sons, now younger, who are washing his car. The young Biff, a high school football star, and the young Happy appear. They interact affectionately with their father, who has just returned from a business trip."

Slow fade.

"That's a wrap, boys!" I said. "I'll be right back; hold on a sec."

I ran to the front of the house, knees on the pink couch, peering through the curtains to see if Mom had returned with Holly. The driveway was blank.

The phone rang. I hoped it was Andrew or Holly.

I picked up before the third ring. It was Dad.

"Is your mother there?"

"Nope," I said. "She went to get Hol." I twirled the cord in my fingers, turning them beet red.

I could hear a faint organ playing in the background. It was death, and now I knew that it was true. It was that close. He was there. Working.
¹³

13. Dad started working at a few funeral homes in late 1990 after several months of secret temp work, the result of his being fired from Aaron Elliot Ltd., a Toronto insurance firm where he had worked as an environmental insurance specialist for the last five years.

Dad asked some more questions, his voice remixed in an indiscernible glaze but with the same focus. I just snapped in frustration, "I don't know! Ten minutes ago? OK, I'll tell her, I'm busy, school project—" and hung up.

I scuttled on my sock feet along the tiles, stopping at the cupboards, doors smacking into their frames, quick pours and plopped in some ice cubes, returned with three glasses and a bowl of chips.

Ejecting the videotape from my camcorder, I put the tape into the VCR, hit rewind and sat down on the floor.

The VCR gears whirred.

When it finally stopped, I pressed play. Instantly we began to laugh, watching the inside of my house transform into the Loman household: the bad costumes, the bad acting, the stammers and acne.

"Oh God!" I choked.

Stephen was chomping away as the opening shot played out, his braces overcome by pre-digested potato chips.

Mom was home, her feet across the carpeting, down the hallway.

"You guys OK?" she asked. When her eye scan met me, her eyebrows went up high, along with her voice. "OK?"

"No, we're all dying. Help us," I said. I hit PAUSE on the tape.

"I went to get your sister, and she wasn't there. Did she call?"

"No."

"It's pouring out. Do you boys have umbrellas? I can drive you to the corner when you're ready to go." The boys nodded in slow motion.

"Oh, Mom, Dad called looking for you. He is coming home at seven, he said, with two dead bodies."

She was now upstairs, probably in the master bedroom. We returned to our academic video theatre. Squirming on the couch, I hit PLAY.

"Oh, come on!" Mom yelled. "Don't give me that!"

I shuddered at the shrill reverb.

Stephen stared at me. I blocked them out and listened to the shuffling upstairs and cringed at Mom exhaling dramatically and stomping, "Well, when will you be back?"

I turned the volume up on the television.

Mom's voice tore through the afternoon. "I WAS THERE!"

I could still feel the boys' eyes on me but wasn't going to let them in; it was all business, a class assignment. I focused on the television. I eyed the chips. Took a sip of icy juice. We laughed at our British accents.

"Not bad," Stephen said, reaching for some chips. "I think it's OK, I mean, we gotta edit it."

"I'll edit it," I said.

I wiped some egg salad residue off on my pants. "I think it's great. Fertuck will like it. When are we presenting again?" I asked.

"I think we're third, so probably not 'til uh, Tuesday," Stephen said.

It was nearly five o'clock when Stephen and Jeremy left, having narrowly escaped the prospect of staying for dinner and working into the night. I felt relieved watching them walk down the driveway into tiny rainy blurs.

"They seem nice," Mom said.

"Yeah, they are the best friends a boy could ever ask for."

"Oh, be quiet and set the table."

"I will. I just have to make a phone call."

"Who are you calling?"

"The prime minister," I said, and dialed Andrew's number on the kitchen phone and pulled the cord around into the hallway.

"He's helping me with my assignment." The last four digits of Andrew's number were permanently etched into me, and when Andrew got the number, he told me it was
sixty-four, thirty-six
, and I remembered how he pronounced the two numbers instead of four. I heard him saying those numbers whenever I dialed.

"What are you doing?" I asked, recognizing Andrew's voice when he picked up.

"Nothing. Going out for dinner. Then might play squash."

"Oh," I said. "Squash, huh. You love that now."

"What?"

"Squash. I thought we could play hockey after dinner."

"Naw, too dark," Andrew said.

"Yeah, you're probably right," I said. "Who you playin' squash with?"

"Alex."

"Oh."

"What are you doing?" Andrew asked, half-enthused.

"Just finished my English project, Arthur Miller thing. Salesman. Who's in your group again?"

"Stuart and Cam."

"Oh."

"Hey, is your dad working at the funeral home now?"

"Uh," I stalled, "whaddaymean?" My heart sank. A choke was building around my throat. I remembered the joke Andrew had with his dad, who was round and fat:
So you're going to be around the house
? Emphasizing
around
, as in
mass
, as in elastic, as in—

"My brother says he saw your dad
¹⁴
there all weekend."

14. I could just imagine my father's interaction at Beverly Funeral Home, quick to laugh at his own jokes, stepping on everyone's silent pauses and excusing himself for cigarette breaks. Dad had method-acting intensity; he treated everyone, no matter what age, in the exact same way. A child's ball would find itself in the path of his car on a family trip, and he'd pull over and get out and begin to lecture the tot. I would begin to panic, heart flooding into my lungs as the parents of the confused youth would come down the driveway onto the street, where Dad would continue his sermon, the same speech: how he was right and they were wrong and that this should not have happened. He loved his voice and sang in the choir. Mom would get nervous whenever a hymn began. Dad sang loud and odd, perhaps out of a necessity to be heard. “I'm doing the harmonies,” he would say. When he was young the choir master taught him to sing harmonies, which is fine, but to the general pedestrian world, well, kids in Sunday School would often ask me, “Why does your Dad sing off-key all the time?”

"I guess so," I said, followed by a shameful sigh.

"You guess so?" Andrew was silent. A car horn sounded off on his end.

"What's that?" I asked, trying to swerve the silent space between us into something else, anything else.

"I gotta go; anyway, talk later," Andrew said, hanging up, the dead dial tone now filling up into my ear.

6 )
Every Second Counts

Friday, April 17th–Saturday, April 18th, 1992

"M
y liver is," Holly began, "...full of liver." Her head was a storm of brown hair cracking through the living room and its morning sun. "Good morning, Doctor Silverman, how's the knee?" Holly said, dragging her feet in tiny steps toward the couch. She stared at me with a monstrous smirk.

"What's that from?"

"My mouth, jerk-off," she said, adding, "
Terminator 2: Judgment Day.
"

"Oh right."

"Maybe this afternoon you can get Mom to take you to the store to get the new
Playboy Girls of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome.
"

"No thanks. You're probably in it," I said. "What's your problem?"

"Headache," Holly said.

It was true. I had spent the morning sniffing the usual
Playboy
sheen in my bedroom jockeying my heart rate as I pawed mentally at the hyper-pink women that delicately paraded themselves, their bodies fingerprinted and creased from our constant exchanges.

Holly picked up a raggedy Penguin paperback of
1984
and began to perform a section. "‘With those children," she exclaimed, "that wretched woman must lead a life of terror...Another year, two years,'" Holly continued, dramatically charged now, "and they would be watching her night and day for symptoms of unorthodoxy..." Holly wilted onto the couch.

I sprang up. "George Michael has a song like that about two fat children and a drunken man."

"Fuck, I have to finish this essay," Holly said, flapping the paperback.

"I feel crazy today, I want to go outside, and I hate this rain."

"Why?" Holly asked. "You don't like the way it is manifestly attacking?"

"I feel like I'm a bug in a jar."

"Who is it for? All the lonely people..." Holly muttered. I turned off the television.

"Hey punk, I was watching that!"

I was trying to read the instruction manual for my camcorder, intent on doing some dubbing over the weekend.

"I feel like I'm on fire," Holly said.

"You were pretty high last night when you got in, or this morning, whatever," I told her.

"Well, I've been accused of everything," Holly said.

"What did you do last night?" I asked.

"Partied with Liz and some boys."

"Where?"

"Just around. You?"

"Nothing happened to me," I said. "Hey, where's Greyskin?"

Greyskin
was the new jab; over the last month or so, Dad's skin appeared to be greying. I mean, it was greying. Other family members had endorsed this notion; even at church people were mentioning it to Mom.
David OK, Diane
? Mom would blame the chemicals at his job.

Speculation, but no real proof. I didn't need it or seek it out: Dad
had
grey skin.

"At work I think," Holly said from behind the bathroom door. Flickers of her brown mane ambushed the mirror. I could see just a cropped section of glass from the hall. She flicked the light off and on comically howling, electrocution style.

"Dad is so grey. Am I gonna have it?"

"Grey skin? Do you want grey skin?"

"No."

"Seriously, what's it from? The formaldehyde?"

"I dunno. Mom says he looks awfully uh, ghoulish, I think she said."

"Yeah," I said. "Maybe he fucks the dead bodies."

"Nate! That's fuckin' gross! I have to take a shower, jog and do a bunch of stuff. Let me be. I'll visit you in your cell later."

Ha!
Ghoulish
. Holly even said so. "Hey Hol-o-caust, can-can you-you read-read my story; it's like only four pages long; it's for school," I yelled in long senseless broken staccato up the stairs.

"I guess so," Holly snapped. "Later, Queer-Bait."

*

Mom had her hands on her hips when I trudged inside the house from the grey wet nothing. Long weekends were always especially dull.

I had started taking off my boots when her tinny voice charged at me, full speed.

"Nate, your Hydra died; I found it in the basement when I was doing a wash."

A shiver ran through me as I imagined its horrible tiny skeleton lying on the cold basement floor like a dead anorexic finger, amputated and abandoned.

I had bought a newt during the March break and housed it in our old aquarium. It was the second newt in five years.

"It was just a skeleton," Mom said, shaking her head as she passed me on the basement steps. "They seem to like to escape your room to kill themselves!" Mom laughed.

"Gross," I said.

One night it must have, like its predecessor, scaled the side of its glass home and high-tailed it out of my room, only to end up starving to death on our basement floor.